GREAT DISTRESS

Taranaki Daily News, 22 January 1935, Page 7

GREAT DISTRESS

MANCHUKUO RUSSIANS

ON VERGE OF STARVATION

DEPLORABLE CONDITIONS

WORSE THAN IMAGINABLE

TOUR BY LEAGUE OFFICER

By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright.

London, Jan. 19.

‘The condition of 30,000 White Russians in Manchukuo is worse than anything I could imagine, and two-thirds are living on the verge of starvation,” said Dame Rachel Crowdy, chief of the social questions section of the Secretariat of the League of Nations, in an interview with the News Chronicle on her return from a two months’ tour. Most of the officials and business men sent away their wives after the murder of Mrs. Woodruff, she said, and consequently girls were unable to find domestic positions. The younger ones, aged 11 and 12, haunted low dance halls, and the elders became Chinese farmers’ mistresses.

Hundreds of Russians, many of noble birth, were living in huts and dugouts built of mud and petrol tins. Some had been 16 to 17 years in such quarters.'

People were committing suicide, owing to their helplessness. Seven or eight were frozen to death nightly in the streets of Harbin. “There are drug shops everywhere,” said Dame Crowdy. “Mobs of lads beg money to spend on dope. There are notorious shelters called small boys’ corners, where scores of doped heroin cigarette smokers with faces like death-heads lean against the walls in 50 to 60 degrees of frost.” Dame Crowdy is making an effort to raise funds in America and elsewhere to succour the sufferers. She says that the Japanese are tackling the problem, but that outside help is essential.